LTI Coordinator Guide Discussion

This thread is destined for the discussion and follow up of the Coordinator Guide, to be built and discussed along the temporarily bi-weekly LTI Coordinators Meetings.
Fill it in with your questions and shared knowledge

How to fish? Which bait to use and where to fish?

There is one thing that I consider very important: don't wait for others to start doing anything. Just keep on doing and make sure they are informed about it, so they can join whenever they feel ready. To translate a short video is quick and more appealing; use this translated video to have a motive to ask someone to help you revise the translation, for example. Being a short project the results will be accomplished soon and sharing a video in your mother tongue, with friends and family, will be a pleasure that will motivate to translate more videos later.
To suggest others to participate in translations without showing them things that are finished and the advantages of it, wont attract people. That is why I don't think you should focus only in the priority list and start promoting only the first content in the list. Yes, do that also, specially with team members that are obviously integrated (staying around asking what there is to do) but take yourself the initiative to translate small videos too. There is a bunch of them in the "Translations" tab in the Working locations wiki page. These videos will fill in Facebook walls and Youtube channels

Consider also that there are people around us with all types of motivations and preferences. Make sure you have always suggestions to translate documents of different types and origins: videos are very common but text documents are also very appealing to many of us; big missions like websites are also what attracts some volunteers; About the origin of the contents, it is good to have your team focusing in different things too: TVP originated, TZM and others external to the movement.

How do we make our message be out there and keep people informed so they join the works someday? I think that only when having different types of fixed structures, that people can find, we will have the pleasure of having someone "knocking on our door" volunteering to join the team. A link in a TZM chapter website, a facebook group/page and a youtube channel makes a triangle of information that will hardly be unseen. I am also in favor that we have some control over these commuication platforms or at least a close contact with its admins, so we wont be dependent of others to post a video, swimming on a bunch of facebook posts looking for our information or be waiting eternally for a web developer to put our language team link on the TM website. Specially the facebook and the youtube I recommend highly that we start our own, and most importantly if the already existing ones are too busy/noisy. To put our resulting translations "out there" is as important as making them

That is it folks!! Hope this helps. Feel free to give alternatives to these suggestions or refine them with what you know.
hugs

The first meeting focusing on this very needed LTI Coordinator's Guide set the stage for what should be some incredibly valuable discussions to come in follow-up meetings. The primary topic covered in this one attempted to surround the focus on new members. Specifically, we discussed where they come from (what attracts people to the project?) and how might individual teams and global support attract more people to individual teams. While I hope that more thoughts & experience on those two subjects will continue to be added to this thread, I've asked the Coord Group to share here their best approaches for welcoming new volunteers/members to their teams. The more we share on topics like this, the easier this will become for other coordinators who may be experiencing difficulty with it, as well as those Coordinators who are newer to the group.

The next Coord meeting is on Feb 25th (two weeks from today - Sat), so it would be great to get input on this from all coords well before then so we can spend some of that meeting expanding upon the ideas shared and asking/answering question to clear up anything that's not as clear as it could be.

Lotta passion there nomada. I am with you on finding ways to increase our numbers.

This is all about marketing, and I started thinking, what if we could do some kind of short marketing/promotional video, i.e., a commercial, and realized that is what we need: a commercial, literally, say just 1 minute long. No, not on television but on the Internet, in the form of a brief worldwide translated video, a video we make ourselves, translated by our team of course. It could start by introducing TZM and then quickly move into the Ling team, ending with a Linguistic Team invitation, again worldwide, for transcribers, translators, time-shifters, proofreaders, and so on. Recruiting just like a damn army ad: "Be all that you can be, in the Linguistics Team!" If we wanted we could do it up with a little publicity: for example when it's launched we could have a jointly planned and coordinated press release with TZM endorsement. (Hey- you know about Peter's tsunami impact with just one email to the membership! This would be that and then some.) This vid is like any other vid going thru our "system," but is a promotion of ->US<- instead of something/someone else. It is logical that we should do this: to pursue our stated goal of growing our numbers with the tools we have. And we do have the tools, and also the resources, granted just barely. But that's the whole point: to bootstrap ourselves into getting what we need, on a global scale, and in the most efficient manner possible, and we do this byusing the tools we have the most efficiently. Stated differently, let's leverage this incredible team!

Hey fellas, Diana from the Italian team sent me the text she uses to greet newcomers into the team, and I really liked it so I decided to change mine too! I think I was a little too dry with mine, so in the following lines I'll give you a remix of Diana's message that can be used as a template.
I think it might be best not to put links to "technical stuff" like how to register here, install this, do that, because they'll find out soon enough (if they're motivated) and that will encourage them to ask questions.

The priority, I think, is to open the communication valves wide open to make sure that they'll be able to get in touch with you. Some people don't like facebook, others won't like the forums, it all depends on where they come from too

Those kinds of messages will be mostly used to greet newbies via email, which means that we don't know right away what kind of knowledge they have of the community and what we do, so it might be nice to add a question about how they got introduced with those concepts. Getting them to talk, in other words

******************

Hi (name)! Welcome to the (language) linguistic team!

I'm (name of the coordinator) and I've been collaborating with the (language) linguistic team since (period of time). I started out in the team as a (role) and I'm now involved in (what you do now).

Do you already have any idea about what you'd like to do with the team? Have you seen any of our projects?

We use the LTI Forum to keep in touch with the latest projects, here's the section dedicated to our language (link to language section)

In particular, I suggest reading (welcome tutorial, if it exists) or the forum/folder that contains new projects open for translation.

Then I'd suggest to register to dotsub.com, which is the web site we use to translate subtitles for our videos.

We use a facebook group to communicate with our teammates (link), and we hold regular voice meetings online thanks to a software called Teamspeak.

The videos we translate are published in our YouTube channel (link).

You can ask any questions you might have by posting on Facebook or in the forum (name of the discussion section, if it exists). You can also get in touch with me using skype (skype nickname) or TeamSpeak to get started with the tools and to provide you with any information you need.